Not Your Grandfather’s Organ
In my rote Saturday-morning trawl through the New York Times’s Arts and Leisure section, I sat up straight when I came across this profile of the 28-year-old organist Cameron Carpenter. How can you resist a story whose first paragraph reports that at a recent church concert (Presbyterian) the musician was attired in “tight trousers and a shirt covered in Swarovski crystals”? Liberace here we come! But no: Carpenter, who was trained at Juilliard and loves to slag off the traditional pipe organ in favor of the digital variety, is adamant about being thought sexy: The Times reports that he “puts a premium on physical appearance. Most organists, he said, ‘don’t look like what people want to look at for an hour.'” That’s a lemonwade Quotation of the Day if ever I heard one.
